Photo: REUTERS
PARIS - Yasser Arafat's widow asked a French court on Tuesday to launch a murder investigation into the death of the Palestinian leader, after a report suggested he was poisoned by a radioactive element before his death in a Paris military hospital in 2004.
Arafat was flown to France in October 2004 from his battered headquarters, where he had been effectively confined by Israel for more than two and a half years, after a sudden collapse in his health.
He died a month later. Arafat aides at the time quoted doctors as saying he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and lost the use of his vital organs one by one.
Allegations of foul play quickly surfaced after the doctors who treated him said they could not establish a precise cause of the illness that led to his death.
The lawsuit filed by his widow Suha and their daughter Zahwa in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, accused a person or persons unknown of premeditated murder.
Their complaint followed a statement by a Swiss institute that it had found surprisingly high levels of polonium-210 on Arafat's clothing -- the same substance used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
A legal source told Reuters the Nanterre court would, in the first instance, have to determine whether it had jurisdiction to examine whether a case of alleged poisoning that took place in another country could be legally investigated in France....read more
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=279530
Al Jazeera uncovered traces of polonium poison of arafat's clothes.
The United States has put pressure on the Palestinian leadership not to seek such an investigation because it can lead to some negative consequences on the Middle East peace process… Of course it will. If Israel is discovered to have killed Arafat, it will make it look like an utter ass and further alienate Palestinians (and the world) from Israel. So what the U.S. is saying essentially is that Arafat’s murder is water under the bridge and it’s far more important to negotiate a peace deal than dwell on the past. This. of course ignores the critical importance of justice and accountability in resolving this conflict.
The Americans seem to have this idea that the Palestinians must somehow sweep all past injustices under the rug, thus developing a severe case of historical amnesia. Only through such forgetting can Palestinians get anything resembling a reasonable deal. Sorry, but I don’t buy that. Such deals shorn of justice are products of expediency. Expediency doesn’t bring closure. It brings a temporary amelioration of symptoms. Then the illness returns in full force with all the bitterness that entails.
Further, such pressure, if this story is correct, proves that these two countries have been lobbied by Israel to stop any investigation that might expose the misdeeds of the Mossad in this case. Once again, the U.S. and Obama administration carry water for their Israeli ally. It’s more important to this president to get elected with as many Jewish votes as he can muster than it is to expose an act of state terror against the head of a foreign government. Just as Obama supports full-throatedly the drone-murder of anti-American militants, he excuses the murder of Yasser Arafat, yet another expendable Muslim....read more
http://www.islamist.com/index.php/world/2199-us-france-pressure-pa-not-to-seek-international-inquiry-into-possible-arafat-murder
Published on 26 Jul 2012 by JourneymanVOD
"This is not a medical issue, it is a political one", says Omar Dakka. Once personal physicito Yasser Arafat, he is hesitant to discuss the precise circumstances surrounding the leader's rapid and mysterious demise. Such trepidation and a frustrating reticence are common among the extended team of medical professionals who surrounded Arafat in his last weeks of life in 2004. French doctors refuse to speak to camera. One of his Tunisian doctors begs not to be drawn into it, "The truth is not with me...don't involve me in such difficult issues." As the continuing controversy throws up suggestions of poison, international assassination and interference, Arafat's doctors reluctance to speak openly begs the question; why?
The secrecy and doubt surrounding his death, is especially interesting considering the political factors at play in 2004. Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon said, "Anybody who is a threat to the Israeli people...I will remove him." At the same time president Bush was saying, "I will call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders." As Mohammed Rashid, former advisor to Arafat, points out, "It was clear that we were heading to a serious deadlock which could cost Arafat his life."
In France despite a myriad of tests using the world's most sophisticated equipment the cause of his illness remained unclear. Crucially however the French do not take samples for poison until four days after his arrival, three full weeks since symptoms began and most tellingly don't perform tests for rare nuclear materials.. "If poisoning had to be suspected, the samples have to be collected very, very rapidly." Not only that but no autopsy was conducted.
Nearly nine years later tests on Arafat's hair samples, provided by Suha, show traces of Polonium. In 2004, no doctor would have suspected its use as a poison, but two years later it was used to kill former Russian spy Alexandre Litvenko. But for definitive proof, it is necessary to go back to the urine samples taken at the time. But despite French law requiring samples are kept for ten years, Arafat's samples were destroyed in 2008 after just 4 years. Despite the evidence stacking up, roadblocks are being erected all around the investigation.
"If I know that Yasser was poisoned, it will close a chapter...the enigma of his death." Suha tell us. As murder looks like an increasingly likely cause of death, Arafat's body is being exhumed and the outcome of his autopsy could have huge political implications for the Middle East.
(MENAFN - Jordan Times)
After all, Arafat was in good health for his age. His sudden illness remained completely unexplained and teams of doctors from all over the world were unable to solve the mystery of what caused his symptoms and eventual death in the military hospital just outside Paris, to which he was airlifted from Ramallah. Yet, after his death there was no international clamor for an investigation, such as the one done in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Al Jazeera's 9-month investigation revealed traces of polonium-210, a radioactive element, on the clothes Arafat wore during his illness. The personal items were provided by Arafat's widow, Suha, and sent for examination to the University of Lausanne's Institute of Radiation Physics in Switzerland.
According to scientists, the traces of polonium were higher than would be expected to occur naturally, and of a type that suggested the substance had been made in a nuclear reactor.
This raises the strong possibility that Arafat was poisoned.
Because polonium poisoning is so rare, it is not routinely tested for and the French doctors did not look for it when Arafat was in their care. Indeed, it was not widely known until two years after Arafat's death. In 2006, the same poison was used to assassinate Russian Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent turned dissident, in London in 2006. It was determined that Litvinenko became ill after drinking tea contaminated with polonium.
Polonium, experts say, is ideal for assassinations because it is lethal only to a person who ingests it, is difficult to trace, its effects are apparently irreversible, and it takes some time to act, allowing the killer to make a getaway.
At this point, the only way to find out for sure if Arafat was murdered with polonium is to test his remains.
If Al Jazeera investigation broke some ground by providing evidence of poison in Arafat's clothing and toothbrush, the distance between this elementary finding and any substantial, conclusive result remains long and difficult.
Many questions still need to be addressed: Why did the Paris hospital keep the medical records of the case secret? And why did it only enable the New York Times to obtain them in 2005, as we were informed by an article by Isabel Kershner on July 5?
Why were the laboratory samples of the deceased destroyed in 2008, as Al Jazeera revealed? French law requires that the samples be kept for 10 years, but only if there is a judicial investigation. There was none in Arafat's case, but then why keep the samples for four years and then suddenly destroyed them?
The other intriguing issue is related to the examination of Arafat's body. It is not clear what the final verdict of the Palestinian Authority on this matter is going to be after some confused hints from authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in response to Suha Arafat's request that the body be exhumed for further testing.
If an examination of Arafat's remains finds levels of polonium consistent with poisoning, the investigation will commence its harder stage of tracking down the culprits.
One must also wonder why the Palestinian Authority remained silent for so many years about a case that looked highly dubious right from the beginning.
Why were there no firm demands that the nature of the illness as well as the cause of death be disclosed in order to remove doubts, and why was there no meaningful, independent and credible Palestinian investigation of the death of such an important leader who spent his last months under humiliating Israeli siege in his destroyed headquarters?...read more
http://www.menafn.com/menafn/1093532748/The-strange-death-of-Yasser-Arafat?src=RSS
By KARIN LAUBMOHAMMED DARAGHMEH
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has given final approval to dig up Yasser Arafat's remains and is also pressing for an international investigation of his predecessor's mysterious 2004 death, a top aide said Monday.
The decision came days after a Swiss lab detected elevated traces of a lethal radioactive agent on clothing said to be Arafat's.
Testing Arafat's bones could offer the last chance to get to the bottom of Palestinian claims that their leader was poisoned, though some experts cautioned it may already be too late for conclusive answers.
Several Palestinian officials have charged that Israel poisoned Arafat. The French doctors who treated Arafat in his final days did not present a clear cause of death, while Israel emphatically denied it killed the Palestinian leader....read more
http://news.findlaw.com/apnews/5a9f7782250f4f7a975bb4d896a377d6
Bradford, United Kingdom - I was 23 years old when I first met Yasser Arafat and I was at the Percy military hospital when he died. I had been with him in the ruins of his various headquarters in Beirut, Tunis and Ramallah. I loved him as if he were my father, and have remained his loyal supporter all my life.
So the news, broken by Al Jazeera, that he may have been murdered using Polonium-210 - the weapon of choice used to kill Alexander Litvinenko after tea in a central London hotel with, we were told, a former colleague of his from the KGB, is of personal as well as political importance to me.
In the case of Litvinenko, we were assured by all news media that only a state actor with access to nuclear weapons could possibly have the means of carrying out this crime. The same media outlets are currently ignoring the inconvenient truth that one such state actor with both a long track record of murdering its opponents and access to the requisite nuclear material is Israel, which, shortly before the death of Arafat - from the mouths of both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert - told the world that their earlier undertakings to the United States not to harm Arafat were null and void, with Shaton saying that the Palestinian leader had "no insurance policy" against Israeli action.
The Al Jazeera report drew heavily on the hitherto silent widow of the late Palestinian leader, Suha Arafat. She provided the program investigators with his underwear, socks, toothbrush, even his ubiquitous kaffeyah which were then tested by a leading Swiss laboratory.
All showed that the Palestinian icon was positively glowing with radioactive material. Those of us who were at the hospital when Arafat died were in no doubt whatsoever that he had been poisoned. The only conversation between us - his veteran comrades - was on the subject of by whom?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201277132124401527.html
